


You are not whole

by Fargosis



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Dark, Existential Crisis, Gen, Hypnotism, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, MGSVPP era, Multiple Personalities, Ocelot character study, POV Second Person, There really isn't a lot out there for solo Ocelot fics, brain washing, if you hypnotize yourself into a new personality and new memory set are you really the same person?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 12:09:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18660157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fargosis/pseuds/Fargosis
Summary: Revolver Ocelot does not exist. As a man nor as a concept, though just barely so. Only the image of him exists and that is what you are. An image. Endless nights and years of self-imposed hypnosis and deep psyche training have ensured that. You know, or struggle to understand, that at one point you were a man. That you felt emotions and had feelings, and that for a while then, even after you were past the point of sensation, you could think feelings. React and realize moments in which it would have been expected for you to express any of many emotions, sadness, disappointment, excitement, anger. But even now this concept is strange and foreign. Now you only know that you react to stimuli because of your coding. The coding done by a man who once shared your name but no longer exists.





	You are not whole

Revolver Ocelot does not exist. As a man nor as a concept, though just barely so. Only the image of him exists and that is what you are. An image. Endless nights and years of self-imposed hypnosis and deep psyche training have ensured that. You know, or struggle to understand, that at one point you were a man. That you felt emotions and had feelings, and that for a while then, even after you were past the point of sensation, you could think feelings. React and realize moments in which it would have been expected for you to express any of many emotions, sadness, disappointment, excitement, anger. But even now this concept is strange and foreign. Now you only know that you react to stimuli because of your coding. The coding done by a man who once shared your name but no longer exists.

Revolver Ocelot---not that you’d know it of course, you have no way of knowing anything outside motherbase and the Diamond Dogs---is admittedly a rather strange name for a man. Although here you fit in as any other among the likes of Aggressive Cat, Brave Elephant, and Sneaky Bear. In some ways it could be thought of as though Revolver Ocelot were just another soldier among these names, another child in this twisted family, perverted and neglected and brainwashed and ultimately designed as a tool by the man who did once share your name, a man who did once exist, and a man who did once earn the coveted spot of command you now fulfil.

What the fuck even  _ IS _ an ocelot? 

You struggle to wrap your mind, if it could even be called that, around the question.

Weeks earlier you are mildly awoken from your haze with a quick jolt, followed by a snicker from the boss as he and Kaz resumed their briefing on the wildlife he will have to look for on his upcoming mission in Brazil.

The incident almost perplexes you, if you could even understand what such a thing would mean anymore. If things could mean things to you anymore.

 

When the boss returns the exchange is mirrored once more. Loyal as always you and Miller stand tall and firm by the landing pad in the infant hours of the next day. Your nearly white hair fluttering past your ears as Pequod lands and the boss, your boss, returns to your world. Your gaze lingers as the background static inside your head takes but a moment to long to reconfigure itself as your boss approaches, grinning warmly. 

“Nice to see a familiar face again eh Adam?”

A light buzzing stirs in the deepest recess of your gut, you’re vision unfocused and mind completely white. In a moment you half-smile at him with a non-committal “yeah” that is soon drowned out and forgotten.

It could be a miracle you remember your name at all.

You sit up in your cot for the remainder of the night, staring at nothing in the dark. What is it.

After the incident you adopt ‘Ocelot’ a bit more thoroughly. Revolver Ocelot is not a man but he is what you are, a standard built for you to occupy by a man named Adam, a man long dead but could almost be your father if you were not literally the same person.

Sometimes you think about Adam and wonder what he must have been like, what to be somebody must have felt like. What feeling must have been like. In a way you are indistinguishable from the other mercenaries. Not literally, Adam was too clever, too thorough to allow for that. Sometimes, you don’t quite feel, but are instead transgressed by the illusion of satisfaction. A smirk rests on your lips and your whole self seems to glow vibrantly. The words don’t make sense or feel familiar as they pass through your mouth, but they aren’t your words afterall, you don’t have any words, just what Adam left behind for you to say.

Your boss seems pleased by this.

If there was a defining difference between you and the other of Adam’s creations---outside of rank of course---it would be that. Perhaps it was mercy or an indifference, or perhaps even malice directed towards yourself, but the others break out into conversation, into grotesque parodies of emotion. You can tell that Kaz can barely tell the difference but chooses to ignore it. For you it is all background static.

You could like Quiet. Learn to like her. Adam had no way of knowing about her, anticipating her arrival, and as such you are left to your own devices in how you interact with her. Almost. It is impossible for you to displease your boss, but luckily, he tolerates her. The idea of freedom, not that you would think to call it that, is intoxicating. You could almost want. Almost. Adam’s reigns on you are far too tight for that. But the idea that Adam’s reign is, as expensive as it is, still limited---well---you could almost be tricked into thinking you’re alive.

Kaz dislikes her.

You have no coding to prevent you from displeasing Kaz. 

 

He catches your attention though, just as he catches your boss’s attention, or perhaps of it. They speak of matters together which you cannot know. Of emotions and organic reactions. It would think to unsettle Adam as you have come to understand him. Your ears buzz painfully as they do so. You almost feel pain but a smarter man may call it distress or disruptive. A shockful disturbance in your usual bland buzzing of existence. 

 

Adam knew pain.

 

It’s one of the first things you are taught about him.

Your boss pushes you towards torture, assuring that Revolver Ocelot, or Adam, or you---as he does not seem to understand the difference---is a master of torture. Prisoners, insubordinates, if his boss named it you would do it. Torture was different from other moments in the day for you. Torture was unignorable loud and hot, a hell on earth with you at the helm. While at other times all you could see or think was white, here you were a guest in a mirage of spectrum. Some victims were blue, some were green, and some were purple, some could even change color depending on what you did. Your boss seemed pleased with your work, and with the rush of torture brought a new sensation. One you could even say you prefered to others. 

 

As perplexing as your existence is if an outsider were to observe it they might misguidedly say that, while you did not feel emotions, you were aware of the shadows of your emotions, the phantoms of feelings, but this is not the case. You are not nearly cognitive enough to tie together any conclusions but if it had to be articulated than you can be known to experience the phantom of the shadow of regular emotions. Not fear itself but an uneasy ache that comes from repressed forgotten emotions trying to break lose in neurochemical expression remembered in only the broadest of impressions from the days of your ape ancestors.

This twinge in your gut could be thought of as the remnant of Adam’s desire to please his boss, of the rush and excitement and overwhelming joy he felt when in control, when twisting that control and oppressing others with it violently. You don’t know that you love torture, you have since learned that Adam did, even if you can’t remember it. But you do remember that you should love your boss.

Like a box stored away under mountains of clutter and other boxes locked away in the bottom of a cellar, the result of repeated hypnosis treatments and personal repression, you can’t  _ see  _ it, you can’t  _ feel  _ it, but you remember that it is there. Even when the purpose and contents of all those other lost bits of yourself---all that stored untouched data as to how Adam ticked, saved and waiting for the day where in he will once again resume life as not half of five but as one whole man---you still know that it is there. Even if it is now nothing more than the memory of a memory, you know it will never be lost.

While this is the only true memory of Adam that you have held onto in some regards it is not the only one that has held onto you. You remember it vividly, out on the deck after a full morning of training the new recruits, one had slipped out of the mess hall and walked slowly with Miller. You watched in the shadows from a distance. Evidently the two men were actually from the same region of Japan, and as much as he would have hated to admit it, Miller was enjoying this little nostalgic voyage with his grunt. The two talked endlessly about local changes and customs, trading stories from their different---and yet familiar, childhood experiences. The word you had given it, after long internal struggles, was ‘bad’. It was bad when others talked about their lives and experiences outside of motherbase and the Diamond Dogs. You didn’t know why, but Adam could perhaps begrudgingly understand if he were pressed on the matter. It wasn’t that you disliked hearing about the outside world, of a time and place different than the one where only you can exist, you aren’t capable of such things and understand and accept it. But when you found to connect the word ‘bad’ to the phenomenon, it made sense. Well. It almost made sense. Your life has a rather low ceiling on sense. But it fit, almost instinctively, almost factual, like 2+2=5.

 

Other things are bad, perhaps in a more comprehensive manner.

When your boss smeared the ashes of his fallen soldiers over his face in mourning, praising their memory and being so overcome as to need to protect them even post-mortem. To know that Kaz understood, to watch the other soldiers and know they shared in sentiment. To go that long with your ears burning in static and your eyes melting in blinding white. That was bad. You were the only one to experience those event as such, but they were close enough to the adjacent experiences of those around you that it was a familiar enough proxy to normal that you had no troubles in moving on and accepting it.

But when your boss had called you family---not you Revolver Ocelot, but the you of all the human bodies composing The Diamond Dogs. You didn’t do anything at first, your eye twitched mildly for but a second before you fauxed the same warm look and smile---copying the reactions of those around you. As you were expected to. As you were programmed to

In the dead of night, sleepless and encased in a suffocatingly hot bed sweat, you struggle to pull yourself outside onto the cool deck. The gentle sea-breeze and light rain offer an immediate but mild blanket of relief to your troubles. Your joints ache and your legs buckle and shake as you attempt to pull yourself up the rail, nearly losing your balance and falling forwards into the deep unforgiving sea. Maybe you should. Your mind all at once is clear and light and heavy and fogged as the waves below. You seem to fall back and forth and back and forth, the illusion of the sea approaching and rescinding as you support your abdomen over the rail does not instil the nausea but merely seduces it as you choke in the rain, hurling a revolting cocktail of blood and vile over the edge, staining the waters briefly a deep red before they disperse into their ordinary blue almost in the same instant. A fitting reminder for your brief influence on this world. The night quickly becomes a nightmare as you find yourself fast learning the true meaning of torture that Adam once before you had come to master. Heat drains from your face as the cool rain becomes agonizingly chilled and all at once you find yourself drowning  and your lungs bursting with air as you heave and gag, the sensation of your hair wet and thick against your neck and droplets running down your face overwhelming and far too real. You find yourself sinking and rising as for the first time since Adam’s departure you are exposed hellishly to earthly sensation. The tiny pale hairs that cover your body stand on ends and despite the rain your mouth and eyes are salty, red, and dry. And yet as your body undergoes tormenting anguish, your legs finally giving out as you roll onto your back staring up into the unforgiving grey sky---your mind is at peace. Just as the sky stretches on forever, soft indistinct grey clouds slowly rolling into one another, so do your thoughts. Slowly but surely they roll into one another again and again, as you once more find yourself refreshed by the rain. You don’t remember what has happened today to bring you here---to stir you awake at night and nearly force you to an early grave---but you are soothed by the gentle grays above you and the cold metal floor against your back, and the soft rains tickling your nose and running down your hair, and you are soothed in the knowledge that you are not whole.

In the morning your boss shakes you from your stupor, your eyes glazed over and your lips thin and red, vile and blood stuck to your face dried in the sun, but you feel soft and light as your boss cradles your body close. His body heat warming you up and giving you life as the pink returns to your fingertips. He brings you to the medibay, you don’t notice the looks of those who pass. You don’t see white but rather a gentle haze, it is good. It is good and if you could bring yourself to enjoy than you very much would in this moment.

He lays you down gently on a cot in the medibay, the medic says something but you don’t hear it, just the gentle hum of the fan. You’re brought blankets and have blood drawn, you’re vital and very real and very  much alive. You can feel it. Your boss kneels besides your bed and he holds your hand in both of his, the mix of heat and the chill from his prosthetic jolt you awake for a moment before you rest back down, eyes wide and alert but somewhere else.

“Ocelot? Adam?” He asks softly for the two men from you, you smile at him and for a moment he is reassured but you shake your head.

“Ocelot? Adam? Adam what’s wrong?” He’s doing his best to stay calm but you’ve been a spy far too long not to see past him as he speaks to you, clutching your hand tighter. Memories dance between the both of you, memories that aren’t yours to have but that you aren’t afraid to enjoy anyways.

Your eyes meet his now, and you place your other hand on top of his reassuringly, a soft chuckle escapes from your lips

“Nothing,”


End file.
